Media planning: where’s the where?
Have media planners forgotten about the importance of where ads are seen? It was a question Newsworks wanted the industry to consider at its annual Shift conference – an event which promotes newsbrands while debating their commercial and editorial futures.
It’s also a question more people have been asking since the emergence of numerous brand safety horror stories in the press over the last 12 months.
Yet beyond the obvious and unsavoury, there is also strong evidence that paying closer attention to the ‘where’ of advertising can help reach consumers who are in a particular frame of mind – meaning they could be more receptive to a brand’s messages.
“In the ‘olden’ days, choices on where to advertise were made on some fundamental principles,” said Denise Turner, Newsworks’ insight director.
“With the advent of digital some of those fundamentals – the building blocks of media planning – appear to have been dismantled, and one of those would seem to be the where. In an era where there is a plethora of choice to reach consumers by, it would seem that ‘where’ you advertise no longer matters.”
Turner said the recent growth of audience targetting and programmatic implementation has, for many agencies and advertisers, downgraded the importance of environment as the focus for ad placement.
The client view presented from the stage at Shift was that there is certainly a problem. Louise Newton, group head of marketing, Hotelplan UK, said the ‘where’ of advertising, had essentially disappeared.
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“I’ve been doing this job since 1990 and back then you could put an advert in the Sunday Times and on the Monday your call centre would be 400 calls heavy with business,” she said.
“But that was nearly 30 years ago. You had control over the ‘where’…now we’ve lost control because of the plethora of opportunities in the marketplace.”
Newton said that as a client and budget controller, she desired more control over the environment and placement of her marketing efforts, but the fact remained that modern marketing meant it was now very difficult.
The agency view, however, was less severe. “It’s not gone – it’s just been somewhat neglected, perhaps,” said Eva Grimmett, managing partner, head of strategy UK, Starcom.
Citing the myriad ways consumers can now be targeted through digital channels, Grimmitt said the industry has got too caught up in the capabilities at the expense of strategy.
“As an industry we have also been obsessed by content,” she said, “But it’s Siamese twin with context…if we talk about being ‘audience first’ – truly audience first – than that’s about being respectful of the mindset and context in which we’re trying to engage them.
“This idea has been lost and needs to come back,” she said.
Newsworks, in partnership with GroupM, has been been conducting an “ambitious” study into this area. It combines behavioural advertising metrics with brand effectiveness meaures to assess how advertising works on quality content sites versus the “run of the internet”.
Turner said her hypothesis is that publishers offer a quality environment for advertisers and that they deliver better results than non-premium publisher sites, or via the open ad exchanges.
Although the study is ongoing, Turner was able to confirm that “it is showing the publisher environment is delivering better quality impressions.”